The House of Blue Leaves is a play by American playwright John Guare which premiered Off-Broadway in 1971, and was revived in 1986, both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, and was again revived on Broadway in 2011. The play won the Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play and the Obie Award for Best American Play in 1971. The play is set in 1965, when Pope Paul VI visited New York City.
Overview
The play is set in Sunnyside, Queens, New York City, New York, in 1965, on the day Pope Paul VI visited. The black comedy focuses on Artie Shaughnessy, a zookeeper who dreams of making it big in Hollywood as a songwriter. Artie wants to take his girlfriend Bunny with him to Hollywood. His wife Bananas is a schizophrenic and destined for the institution that provides the play's title. Their son Ronnie, a GI scheduled for deployment to Vietnam, has gone AWOL. Three nuns are eager to see the pope and end up in Artie's apartment. A political bombing mistakenly occurs in the apartment.
Productions
The first act of The House of Blue Leaves was first staged in 1966 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. According to Jane Kathleen Curry, (Assistant Professor of Theater at Wake Forest University) Guare "rewrote the second act many times and attributes part of his difficulty to his lack of technical skill in writing for a large number of characters in a full-length play."[1]
Clive Barnes, in his review of the 1971 Off-Broadway production for The New York Times wrote: "You will have noticed, I presume, that comedy has taken on a hysterical edge. The laughter is manic, and the world is awry. Few worlds are more awry than John Guare's, whose play, 'The House of Blue Leaves,' opened last night at the Truck and Warehouse Theater.
Mr. Guare's play is mad, funny, at times very funny, and sprawling."[9]
The Variety reviewer of the 2011 revival wrote: "Guare’s iconic play not only holds up, it still sets the bar for smart comic lunacy.... Guare is famous for the zany plots that illustrate his surreal visions of what passes for modern civilization.... But the key to the play lies beyond these apartment walls, in the broader framework of the unsettled period of the mid-Sixties, when America was still reeling from the assassination of JFK and just becoming aware of what was going on in Vietnam."[10]
